Staff Storage Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure)

Location: Hybrid, with presence in the San Francisco or Bellevue office 4 days per week; Tuesday is the designated work-from-home day. San Jose office location is also listed.

Salary: $349,000–$465,000 annually for San Francisco/San Jose; $314,000–$419,000 annually for Bellevue.

Company

Lambda builds AI cloud infrastructure and high-performance compute, storage, and networking systems for researchers, enterprises, and hyperscalers.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for storage software architecture across petabyte-scale deployments and lead architectural reviews.
• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance storage systems across NFS, SMB, Lustre, NVMe-oF, iSCSI, and S3.
• Build distributed systems for storage orchestration and integrate them with NVMe, GPU-direct, and DPU-accelerated hardware.
• Own storage software delivery from requirements and design through deployment, monitoring, benchmarking, profiling, and capacity planning.
• Partner with networking, control plane, Kubernetes, observability, compute, and fleet engineering teams to define and track storage SLOs and SLIs.
• Optimize storage for AI workloads including checkpoint I/O, high-throughput dataset serving, and latency-sensitive inference pipelines.

Requirements

• 10+ years of storage systems engineering experience, including 5+ years in a technical lead or Staff+ individual contributor role.
• Production experience designing and operating multi-petabyte storage infrastructure in data center or cloud environments.
• Strong proficiency in C, C++, Rust, or Go, with experience writing high-performance concurrent systems software.
• Hands-on production expertise with at least two object, block, or file storage protocols.
• Experience profiling and tuning throughput, latency, and IOPS using tools such as fio or elbencho.
• Working knowledge of NVMe, NVMe-oF, RDMA, DPUs, physical data centers, storage reliability, incident response, and observability tools.

Nice to have

• Experience with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, SuperNICs, or GPUDirect Storage.
• Production experience with Vast Data, Weka, NetApp, Lustre, or Ceph at scale.
• Familiarity with CXL memory pooling, computational storage, ZNS SSDs, or open-source storage projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Cash and equity compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles.
• 401k plan with a 2% company match for USA employees.
• Flexible paid time off.